scenery

it overacts every line

14 HP

It chews the scenery: it follows one voice and plays the line back wooden, or with every bend and vibrato blown up. Left alone it loses its temper until it throws the glass, and only a drink calms it.

The SCENERY panel: black, with a glass in gold dots down the middle, its drink thrown up out of it in a spray of droplets, 110 of them small round lights of bare circuit board, climbing past the knobs to the top corners. HAM, the big knob, sits in the bowl of the glass with TEMPER and SCREAM either side and a jack over each; PITCH and TANTRUM beside the glass, IN and DRINK's trigger under them, OUT and THROW at the foot, and the DRINK button on the glass's stem. scenery at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. DRINK is a button: press it for a drink. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

What you hear is the rack through SCENERY. The voice, the drums and the band are made in the page as you listen.

example patches

The tracking, the overacting, the temper and every out here are SCENERY's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The voice, the drums and the band are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

Overacting

Patch one voice into IN: a sung line, a lead, a bass. It has to be one note at a time, because SCENERY follows its pitch. On drums it works on the drop of a kick or a tom, and makes the drop bigger.

HAM: noon is the line as played. Full left it's wooden, one note at one level. Full right every move away from the line's own centre is six times bigger in pitch and three in level: a two-semitone wobble becomes an octave swoop, a slide an octave dive.
SCREAM: where the loud moments tip over into a scream, folded and driven. At zero it's clean however loud; at full every accent screams.
The CVs: a jack over each knob, ±5 V turning it half its travel.

Its temper

Left alone, it loses its temper. While the voice sounds, HAM climbs by itself from where the knob is, and the droplets climb out of the glass with it, amber going white. At the top it throws the glass. Only a drink calms it.

TEMPER: how fast it climbs: from noon to the throw in 4 seconds at full, half a minute at noon, never at zero. A rest holds it where it is.
DRINK: the button, or a trigger at its jack. A gulp, a swallow of silence, and HAM is back where the knob is. It glows as the temper rises and blinks when it wants a drink; clock it every eight bars for a build that resets on every phrase.
The throw: the droplets flash, the line breaks off for a quarter of a second, and the climb starts again from the knob.

What comes out

OUT: the voice overacted, 25 ms behind IN.
PITCH: the overacted line as 1 V/oct, 0 V a C. It holds the last note through breaths and rests, so an oscillator on it sings along.
TANTRUM: how far gone it is: 0 V wooden, 5 V as played, 10 V at the throw. Into a filter on the band, the band swells with it.
THROW: a trigger as it throws the glass, for a crash, a sample or a reset.